Today I spent the bulk of my Father’s Day organizing things at my Mom’s house trying to separate what we want to keep and what we want to sell and what is just trash. I also had fun getting her cat, who was quite unwilling, to come out of the house so we can find a home for it. I even managed to visit my Father’s gravestone at the cemetery while I was in town. It was the first time he got to meet my wife and two daughters.

I could write a big article about the some odd eight garbage bags of old computer software I cleaned out of her basement (mostly games) which is only about half of my collection there. What I started thinking about on the hour and a half ride home was, for some reason, scenes with fathers from some movies I enjoyed. Particularly where they saved their children.

I came up with the idea of a top three movie fathers moments so here it is in honor of the holiday and in honor of my father.

What can you say about this performance? Someone kidnaps his daughter overseas and he tears apart anybody who gets in his way finding her. It is what every parent wishes they could do in this situation. While all parents can get something out of the movie, fathers who have daughters will find it resonates with them. He basically kicks butt the whole movie doing whatever he has to in order to save his little girl.

I found this movie on free cable and absolutely loved it. You have a depressed policeman whose marriage and whole life basically is falling apart and the long spiral all goes back to him losing his father, a fireman, when he was a young boy. Through a weird aurora borealis effect, he is able to talk to him in the past over his Dad’s old ham radio and he starts altering his Dad’s and ultimately his own timeline. Now there are some twists and turns where his Dad’s and later his Mom’s fates change every time he thinks he has things just right. The ending is awesome. The son is fighting with the person who killed his mother at the same time his father is fighting a younger version of the same man before he did it. It looks like the son is going to die in the present day and then there is his Dad, who is still alive now in the altered present, to blow a whole in the guy.